Some of the resonances began as simple metaphoric linkages, as with the military register preferred by NFL Films, whose first production, the 1963 film The NFL’s Longest Day, riffed on the recently released D-Day epic, The Longest Day. By the mid-60s, NFL Films consciously shaped football-on-film into an active part of the war effort by appropriating military language like “search and destroy.” Between 1966 and 1971, NFL Films’ highlight packages built morale and extended the NFL’s (and America’s) soft power—while adeptly mingling the two—across the globe. Secretary of State William Rogers brought a supply on tour in the Far East. Air Force One flew a film to President Lyndon Johnson’s ranch in Texas, while President Richard Nixon ordered a big-hits special for the White House. In 1971, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird publicly pledged “a two-minute bureaucratic drill” to ensure that the Armed Forces Network provided servicemen with more televised football.

In addition to being shipped to Vietnam, these films were shown on transcontinental flights; at the Continental Hotel in Paris, where homesick fans could savor the national pastime while munching hot dogs; on Navy submarines; even in Saudi Arabia, where oil companies ordered copies of the films to console “American workers far from home.” As one reviewer wrote, NFL Films’ magnum opus, They Call it Pro Football, presented an “action-packed display of the beauty and violence of the game—and its impact on the entire country.”

At least half of this new importance derived from political actors eager to purchase the NFL’s new currency. “When I mention Nixon’s knowledge of sports, [people] immediately seem to show a great interest in him. . . . This creates a great rapport with sports fans everywhere,” one worker for the Nixon presidential campaign wrote in 1968. In 1960, John F. Kennedy’s campaign enlisted prominent athletes (including Big Daddy Lipscomb, Lenny Moore, Chuck Bednarik, Alan Ameche, Norm van Brocklin, and Johnny Unitas) to endorse him, and by 1968 the process was in full swing, with every candidate’s campaign organization boasting an athletic-endorsement apparatus. The brochure for Athletes for Nixon in 1968 prominently featured Bart Starr’s exhortation to support “the Number One quarterback calling signals for my team.” That QB1, Richard Nixon, did the most to cement the connection between the NFL and the Republican presidents by becoming the first president to attend an NFL regular-season game, publicly honoring Vince Lombardi, and corresponding with the Redskins’ George Allen, whom he thanked after his overwhelming victory in 1972: “it would be impossible for me to repay you adequately for all the work you did during the campaign.”

The result was that, institutionally, NFL football positioned itself somewhere right of center. Radicals like Dave Meggyesy, who protested the anthem and the game itself, could be marginalized as long-haired freaks who had failed the essential test of manly Americanism that football posed. But liberal fans and players could enjoy the game without too much cognitive dissonance because, after making common cause with pro-war forces in the early 70s, the NFL generally avoided making such overt statements.

But who won? When kneeling was at its height in October and November, after late-September comments from President Trump that reinvigorated the protests on a national (if not global) stage, it seemed to have nudged the NFL a few inches leftward: it promised to donate $89 million to community organizations and otherwise react more positively to the protests—though not, significantly, to sign Colin Kaepernick, who had to watch a parade of blatantly inferior quarterbackstake the field. That donation-without-signing split the leaders among the protesting players, and by season’s end the number of kneeling players had dwindled measurably.

So what initially seemed to be a moment of reckoning for the NFL may now represent simply a more significant, but ultimately ineffectual, challenge to its historical practice of blurring lines. Will Colin Kaepernick ever take the field again? Will anyone protest at the Super Bowl, since its inception the NFL’s primary means of naturalizing its putatively non-ideological ideology? Stay tuned.